The dark side of social media

Social media can cause dangerous distractions as well as facilitate bullying. (Photo by David De Lossy)

Since its inception, social media has become an increasingly important part of American culture. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites have swept the nation and have come to dominate the millennial generations way of thinking and behaving.

Not all of the changes have been good, however.

From a distracted woman walking off a pier while texting to another woman committing suicide while on Facebook — which seems forever under fire for privacy issues — recent events have prompted increased attention into the hidden pitfalls and dangers of the social media phenomenon.

While false information spread through the internet can be damaging, it’s not nearly as unsettling as watching someone commit suicide.

While suicides are always unfortunate, they are not normally as shocking as when a Taiwanese woman recently killed herself while Facebooking with her friends.

She went so far as to take pictures of her room as it filled up with poisonous carbon dioxide fumes from her coal fire. Although her online friends attempted to dissuade her from ending her life none of them contacted authorities.

Events such as these, while they cannot be directly blamed on social media sites, are not helped by online applications like Adult Swim’s “Five Minutes to Kill Yourself” in which players intentionally damage their character.

Games like this are popular among college students who have grown up in the computer age. These students feel free to update their status profiles to include images and updates of a questionable nature and are unaware that others could be watching.

In a study conducted by the Massachusetts’s Attorney General’s office and Boston University’s AdLab it was discovered that college age students do not realize the inherent dangers of social media profiles.

The study found that while college students routinely search the web to discover information about other people, they somehow believe that they are immune to the process themselves.

While efforts by parents and educators nationwide have helped educate young people on the dangers of giving out personal information via social media, they have not yet been able to curb bullying or its affects.

Take the case of Dharun Ravi, a former Rutgers University student, who was convicted of invasion of privacy and other charges after using a webcam to spy on his roommate’s gay encounter and the tweeting about it. His roommate, Tyler Clementi, would later commit suicide by jumping off of the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, 2010.

For those millennials who want to ditch the ways and means of social media and its hidden pitfalls, a new application has been created that makes a game out of deleting all the accounts of its user.

Users can sit and watch as their Facebook, Myspace and other accounts are deleted on this “social media suicide” application. However, Facebook has since put up blocks, stopping the website from defriending people.